Annals of imbecility: $5 ISP tax to fund online journalism?

Interested stakeholders are trying to convince the federal government to slap …

First, an important note: the federal government is not, in fact, proposing to save newspapers by reining in fair use, creating a national "hot news" right over facts, or charging Internet subscribers $5 a month.

But plenty of people are, and they have now resorted to seeking government support for some of the worst "save the media" ideas ever put to paper.

Investigating journalism

The Federal Trade Commission has been deep in a review of American newsgathering, trying to see if the government can play some useful role in ensuring the survival of local journalism, in-depth reporting, and other forms of journalism often lamented as being in decline. As part of that process, it recently released a document of "potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism."

Despite repeated notes that these were not FTC "recommendations" but stakeholder suggestions, some outlets pitched these as government ideas for news. A Fox News columnist from the Media Research Center called the document a "47-page terrifying bureaucratic plan to insinuate government into the very information that forms the basis for democracy... Coming on the heels of the government’s new $350 billion national broadband plan, this shows an extensive attempt by the Obama administration to seize control of the press... Those freedoms don’t matter to the left."

This is about as aggressively stupid as an op-ed can be. Case in point: "In Third World nations, the left would send troops or rioters to TV stations and newspapers to seize complete control of the media. Here they try to do it with the FCC and FTC."

And the FTC got so fed up with this sort of thing that it took the highly unusual step of issuing a press release, complete with full sentences underlined for emphasis. "The FTC has not endorsed the idea of making any policy recommendation or recommended any of the proposals in the discussion draft," it said. "Recent press reports have erroneously stated that the FTC is supporting and proposing some of the public comments (for example, taxes on electronic devices, favoring one medium over another)."

We get it. These aren't FTC ideas. They're only being circulated to aid discussion. But many are still bad—truly execrable stuff. Let's take a look.

Are you kidding me?

Rein in fair use. Hey, how about passing legislation "clarifying that the routine copying of original content done by a search engine in order to conduct a search (caching) is copyright infringement not protected by fair use"? This, a truly brain-dead idea, would raise "difficult questions about unintended consequences," as the FTC staff put it.

If companies don't want to be spidered by search engines, they can use robots.txt to opt out. Even the FTC staffers know this; why doesn't everyone else?

(If you want to read the original proposal, you can (PDF); it was drafted by a DC lawyer.)

Charge ISPs a monthly fee. Yes, the ideas can get worse, as evidenced by this beauty. One participant suggested:

amending the copyright laws to create a content license fee (perhaps $5.00 to $7.00) to be paid by every Internet Service Provider on each account it provides. He suggests creating a new division of the Copyright Office, which would operate under streamlined procedures and would collect and distribute these fees. Copyright owners who elect to participate would agree to periodically submit records of their digitized download records to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office could verify these records by commissioning market-by-market sampling by organizations like Nielsen, ARB, and Comscore. He suggests these fees could provide a financial floor that allows publishers to leverage additional income, and would encourage, not discourage, the operation of market forces, and stimulate experimentation and innovation.

Did you follow that? You would pay an extra $5 a month for Internet, and that money would be divvied up to news organizations based on how frequently you visited them during the month. As a voluntary model, this is unobjectionable, especially if such media would then come free of ads; as a mandatory tax on every customer of every ISP in the country, in an era where information overload is a pressing problem, it smacks of lunacy.

According to an FTC footnote, the idea came from Stephen Nevas of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Why does Nevas think ISPs should foot this new tax? Prepare to bang your head on the table in frustration, because this is his answer:

"Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) sell access to free content but pay nothing for the privilege. Only in rare cases do Web users pay for what they download. Just three percent pay for what they use, according to Forrester Research data."

Of course, nothing the ISPs do has any effect on whether a journalistic enterprise charges for its services, or on how those charges are implemented.

Someone stop this man from speaking about the Internet. Please.

Federalize "hot news" law. Copyright does not give news organizations any right over facts about the world, only over the specific words used to describe those facts. But because it is so easy to “free ride” on the expensive work of real journalism by sitting in a cubicle somewhere and rewriting other people's work, some states have passed "hot news" laws that give journalists a quasi-property right over their stories for a short amount of time.

One proposal would recreate this at the national level. In the current media landscape, however, this would create huge problems. Though the big players who are most likely to complain about hot news misappropriation like to play the victim (and some truly are victims), we live in a world in which major stories are routinely unearthed by bloggers and citizens and small newspapers and big players. Everyone shares, everyone copies.

As the FTC noted, "News organizations and writers, including print, broadcast, op-ed writers, and other commentators, routinely borrow from each other. One panelist suggested that '[m]uch of what is done by newspapers with each other is actually problematic under existing hot news doctrine.'"

Antitrust exemption for paywalls. It's tough to mount a paywall today; one news site can do it, but there are so many other options that it's suicide for all but the most valuable and/or niche sites. This alone would seem to show that "journalism" is not in crisis, though it's certainly changing as geographic barriers crumble and every news outlet suddenly competes with every other news outlet.

But one proposal would remove anti-collusion rules from news organizations so that they could all get together and jointly work out some kind of paywall agreement. As one backer of this idea put it, "Publishers are rightly fearful that erecting pay walls will only be effective if it can be accomplished industry-wide, and they need an exemption to accomplish these reasonable policies."

As the FTC notes, though, "more recently, it appears that industry requests for an antitrust exemption have abated."

Tax your gadgets. One suggested way to pay for news: slap a 5 percent tax on all consumer electronics and somehow pass it out to news organizations. "A 5 percent tax on consumer electronics would generate approximately $4 billion annually," says the report.

Tax your cell phone and Internet. Others suggest that "consumers could pay a small tax on their monthly ISP-cell phone bills to fund content they access on their digital services. A tax of 3 percent on the monthly fees would generate $6 billion annually. They note, however, this is the least desirable approach because demand for these services is 'elastic' and even a slight rise in price could result in people dropping the service."

Signs of intelligent life?

Some ideas were less terrible than others; a few were even interesting.

Establish a "journalism" division of AmeriCorps. Put young people to work as journalists through the AmeriCorps service program. “It strikes us as a win-win," one participant said. "We get more journalists covering our communities, and young journalists have a chance to gain valuable experience—even at a time when the small dailies where they might have started are laying reporters off."

Boost public media funding. One report suggested that "public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting, and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country."

Tax credit for journalists. This would give news outlets a credit "for every journalist they employ." The main backer of the idea has already died, but "one speaker noted it is one way to subsidize journalists without the government picking one paper over another."

Turn college students into journalists. "If the nation’s 200,000 journalism and mass communications students spent 10 percent of their time doing actual journalism," said one participant, "that would more than make up for all the traditional media jobs that have been lost in the past 10 years."

Radio Free America? Right now, $700 million is spent by the US government on content for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Legally, this can't be broadcast in the US. A change to that law could provide new, cheap sources of news content, though it is government-funded content.

84 Reader Comments

So basically, these people are not making as much money as before... and they have gotten used to that large fat cow every pay day so lets just give them money even though their media is getting outdated and eroded more each passing day.

Oh, if only the buggy whip manufacturers had some good lobbyists they would still be getting _free_ money to this day - from the govt. and you and me.

I think the most refreshing thing about this whole article is that it was an honest-to-God journalist that was pointing out the ludicrousness of all this. I value news and I'm even willing to pay for news (I rather like newspapers still). The problem is, I want to pay for news that I find valuable. Ideally, I'd not pay part of my cable bill that goes toward Fox News and MSNBC (possibly not CNN either). I don't like those. The local news each night is 90% all sensationalist crap. There's only so many stories about robberies, shootouts, and gang activity that I can watch before I just start to lose faith in humanity. You rarely hear about many of the technical issues that make it on sites like this. You rarely hear anything about national issues as well--I guess local news just lets Fox, CNN, and MSNBC take care of that stuff. You can't get all news in anywhere near one place, which is fine. However, I don't want to sift through mounds of crap reporting to get to a few diamonds of journalistic integrity. There's a reason Ars and Reuters are about the only news sources I go through anymore. Well, that and Daily Show, but I don't really count that as a real news source. If they have their facts straight, then awesome. I've learned something. If they don't, then I'm just laughing. No big deal there.

Part of the problem is that the Internet does break down a lot of the barriers between journalism and social commentary. But the other part of the problem is that too many journalists are not reporting quality news. They can't expect us to keep paying them and keep patronizing them if they're not going to do the one thing they're allegedly trained to do. Thanks, Nate, for putting out such a shining example of how a reporter should be!

Establish a "journalism" division of AmeriCorps. Put young people to work as journalists through the AmeriCorps service program. “It strikes us as a win-win," one participant said. "We get more journalists covering our communities, and young journalists have a chance to gain valuable experience—even at a time when the small dailies where they might have started are laying reporters off."

This is a GREAT idea, and one that I haven't heard before. Volunteer service is becoming more and more popular (as the meme settles into the public consciousness), this would be an excellent way to follow this wave of popularity.

These awful ideas from the news outlets, and their biased reporting of their own suggestions as if they came from the government - that is the reason many "news outlets" are dying off. They not only don't provide any value, but many are plain stupid.

Instead of free money, they really should put all their effort into the last ideas - where they do work and encourage new blood coming into the industry.

Radio Free America? Right now, $700 million is spent by the US government on content for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Legally, this can't be broadcast in the US. A change to that law could provide new, cheap sources of news content, though it is government-funded content.

Wait, you mean to tell me that we spend $700 million a year on content that isn't even legal for broadcast in the US? Where does it get used? Why on earth do we do that? We can't fund the manned space program anymore, but we can piss $700 million down than toilet on nothing. Lunacy...

So basically, these people are not making as much money as before... and they have gotten used to that large fat cow every pay day so lets just give them money even though their media is getting outdated and eroded more each passing day.

No, they're not just making less money, many of them are outright going out of business. The ones that are surviving are hitting lower limits on expenses. The physical newspaper isn't as popular, but the consumption of news is dramatically up and when newspapers (who write by far more and more in-depth news than anyone else) close shop it's a problem for both their community and the whole nation.

A free press has been called "the fourth estate" in its role as a government watchdog. Without it things like the break in at the Watergate Hotel would have been a footnote in the Washington Post and McCarthism could have lasted months or years longer.

The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

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Oh, if only the buggy whip manufacturers had some good lobbyists they would still be getting _free_ money to this day - from the govt. and you and me.

I wonder how many tax dollars are spent each year in press releases and public awareness campaigns merely to correct the factual errors of Fox News. Perhaps investing in real journalism would save money overall.

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Which are you referring to - the bloggers or the journalists?

Because from where I'm sitting they both are capable of having political agendas or getting paid by the parties and companies they support. The only difference is the manner in which they disseminate their ideas.

So basically, these people are not making as much money as before... and they have gotten used to that large fat cow every pay day so lets just give them money even though their media is getting outdated and eroded more each passing day.

No, they're not just making less money, many of them are outright going out of business. The ones that are surviving are hitting lower limits on expenses. The physical newspaper isn't as popular, but the consumption of news is dramatically up and when newspapers (who write by far more and more in-depth news than anyone else) close shop it's a problem for both their community and the whole nation.

A free press has been called "the fourth estate" in its role as a government watchdog. Without it things like the break in at the Watergate Hotel would have been a footnote in the Washington Post and McCarthism could have lasted months or years longer.

And if they come to depend on the government to fund them, how well do you think they will continue to function as a check on the government?

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The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

The difference between a government-funded press and "no press to smash" is irrelevantly small if we're talking about the notion of "free press" envisioned by the founders. Not to mention that your assertion that free press is the notion upon which the United States was founded is absurd.

Edited to add: in fact, the very idea that you're invoking the will of the founders in an effort to somehow justify governmental intervention at the federal level to prop up the centralized dissemination of information is ridiculous. Do you honestly believe you could sit Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin down in a room and convince them that the federal government should levy taxes to fund news publishing? Have you even read anything they wrote?

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And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Luckily, there's no such thing as the parties and companies you mention influencing the news that gets reported by "real" journalists. This is why Fox News is such a bastion of rationality and objectivity.

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Oh, if only the buggy whip manufacturers had some good lobbyists they would still be getting _free_ money to this day - from the govt. and you and me.

Strawman. The free press has nothing to do with this analogy.

And you'd be right, if we were talking about plans to save the free press. As soon as it becomes dependent on government money or intervention, it ceases to be the free press. Instead, we're talking about saving a business model - because that's all these suggestions would accomplish.

From the article: "You would pay an extra $5 a month for Internet, and that money would be divvied up to news organizations based on how frequently you visited them during the month. As a voluntary model, this is unobjectionable, especially if such media would then come free of ads"

I was in the publishing biz for 10 years (editorial side), and helped to spearhead the demise of the traditional publishing model by deploying some of the first publisher-owned web sites in 1994 to 1996.

From my POV, the taxation idea is absolutely abhorrent and "journalists" should be utterly ashamed to even suggest it. In fact they should be fired and banished from the profession as modern day Ellsworth Tooheys.

However, some kind of consortium-based subscription model might help to replace the old (and completely dead) model, exactly along the lines of what's discussed above but (again) not as an extortionate tax but rather as a voluntary payment. You'd pay perhaps $10.00 per month and be subscribed to 10 or 50 or maybe 100 different publications. Gee, does that sound familiar? I might not want to be nickled and dimed to death by 20 publications, but I might want a clean and simple single payment to get online access to a consortium of them.

That does not solve the problem of the demise of print advertising, but that's an issue which is well and truly dead.

Print advertising (indeed all advertising) has been completely usurped by the death if the physical print and physical distribution models: why in the heck should anyone spend gazillion$ on print or even electronic advertising when they can build and run a proprietary web site for substantially less money and 100 times more control? In such a world, shipping your print ads around the nation and the globe encased in little paper packages (magazines and newspaper) seems ridiculous and foolhardy, even bizarre.

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Which are you referring to - the bloggers or the journalists?

Because from where I'm sitting they both are capable of having political agendas or getting paid by the parties and companies they support. The only difference is the manner in which they disseminate their ideas.

The news media is more likely to have a corporate bias toward the agenda of the company that owns them and their business interests. The individual reporters are just rank and file workers doing what they're told to do by editors who are doing what they're told to do by the publisher.

My local paper is accused up and down as having a liberal bias, but every reporter and editor I've met who works there is pretty conservative. (I'm a Informatics major with a journalism cognate and my university employs many of them as adjuncts.)

It's the Federal TRADE commission. What the hell does local news have to do with commerce at the Federal level? Who the hell gave these idiots the mandate to even think about these topics? Let alone issue discussion papers.

I propose legislation that much more clearly circumscribes the powers of the FTC. I had thought they were rather well delineated, apparently not well enough.

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

While I agree with your sentiment that it is in the best interests of democracy that we promote journalism and that this exercise is not simply about propping up a few media companies, I think the FOX quotes above show that "journalists" themselves have a political agenda. It's convenient to dismiss bloggers as second class journalism, but individual bloggers should be judged on their merit -- just like so-called news organizations should be judged. (And damned few of them make the cut.)

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Which are you referring to - the bloggers or the journalists?

Because from where I'm sitting they both are capable of having political agendas or getting paid by the parties and companies they support. The only difference is the manner in which they disseminate their ideas.

The news media is more likely to have a corporate bias toward the agenda of the company that owns them and their business interests. The individual reporters are just rank and file workers doing what they're told to do by editors who are doing what they're told to do by the publisher.

And this, in your mind, is inherently better than a blogger? How, exactly, is "the rank and file workers doing what they're told to do" more in keeping with the notion of a free press than average people posting their take on events without being answerable to anyone in particular?

The individual reporters are just rank and file workers doing what they're told to do by editors who are doing what they're told to do by the publisher.

I was one of "them" (in publishing) for 10 years, and I can only say that what you've asserted above is flatly untrue. In fact it's so patently untrue that it's not even worth discussing or dignifying in any further detail.

This is one of the worst-written pieces I've seen on Ars. I suppose when the headline is as over-the-top as "annals of imbecility," I should have set my expectations down near the sea bed. But since this is Ars and Ars is usually calmer than the average tech site, I foolishly expected a reasoned argument instead of a strange freak-out. As the author points out, nobody with any power to do anything is proposing a fee. Nothing to see here; move along.

Even as non-news, the author continually declines to engage in reasoned discourse. The proposal for for the ISP surcharge is festooned with a "it comes from a DC lawyer" banner to rally the masses against it. He warns us to "prepare to bang your head on the table" when we read an opposing view.

No wonder the author opposes any surcharge that might pay journalists: he's clearly not one. This doesn't even raise to the standards of average blog quality opinion posting. For shame, editors, for letting this shoddy work sully the Ars banner.

The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

What a strange spin on reality. "Free press" means free of all government intrusions. Do you truly believe that a government-funded "free press" is free of government influence?

And on your second point you are also wrong. The first thing a dictator does is to smash the airport runways and then to seize the lines of communication. The presses won't ever be smashed, they'll be used to for propaganda.

wtf is with corporate socialism in the usa. its a free market economy to every citizen when it comes time to pay your monthly bills, find a meal, get a roof, or pay your doctor. but let an industry lose a dime and they start screaming for a hand out.

if they current papers can't survive in america, it's time for them to die. screw making me pay for something i don't want nor asked for.

at this rate the pony express and the telegraph should start asking for tax-funded handouts to keep those services alive. how about the 8-track industry too..

free market. if an industry can't sustain viability, it changes or dies. put your hands back in your own pockets and stay out of mine.

"Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) sell access to free content but pay nothing for the privilege. Only in rare cases do Web users pay for what they download. Just three percent pay for what they use, according to Forrester Research data."

Am I the only one that doesn't understand the issue with this? They sell access to free content that they don't pay for..... So, again, they sell physical access (which they actually have to pay to maintain), so that FREE content remains FREE, right? ISP's don't charge to view free content, they charge to allow you to be able to connect to the servers, which allow you to view free content. Just like newspapers don't charge you for the news, they charge you for the paper the news is printed on. (don't newspapers get free news from the AP when they do non-local news?)

My thoughts are, the newspaper gets ad revenue online, so, they ARE being paid for it, just not by the ISP. This is almost double dipping to me, they get paid to serve up advertisements, which means they are making money off of the people who are going to their site, and then they want to be paid AGAIN for the privilege to give out free news. If they can't keep up with the times (RIAA, MIAA included), LET THEM DIE THEIR DEATH. That's what free market is, it's survival of the fittest companies. Can't change with the times, well, you'll be outdated and making ZERO money as quickly as there is a cheaper/more viable alternative. Better to weed out the weak companies (and let people go unemployed for a while) than to allow a non-viable business to operate for longer than it can on its own. A little cold hearted, I know, but it's better, in the long run, for all businesses and our economy. Businesses do not have a RIGHT to exist. They have a right to try to exist, but they have no reason to exist if they can't be a legitimate business.

However, some kind of consortium-based subscription model might help to replace the old (and completely dead) model, exactly along the lines of what's discussed above but (again) not as an extortionate tax but rather as a voluntary payment. You'd pay perhaps $10.00 per month and be subscribed to 10 or 50 or maybe 100 different publications. Gee, does that sound familiar? I might not want to be nickled and dimed to death by 20 publications, but I might want a clean and simple single payment to get online access to a consortium of them.

I'm not the type of person to use an online subscription as much as I would the paper - I like to wander back and forth from section to section and article to article, and with too many sites, you need to either open a thousand and one tabs or you'll never find that article again. With paper, they article I saw on B17 is still going to be on B17.

Nevertheless, I'd love to see something like what you propose become the foundation of an cover + ala carte system. For a minimum cover of $5 or $7.50/month, users would get access to 0 or 100 points worth of media. Users could allocate those points to whatever courses they want, with different products costing different points (thus accommodating for differences in product). After using the base allotment, users can add additional products for $.05/point. Users wouldn't need to get the channels they don't use, and the distribution company would have a minimal spend from subscribers to ensure some profit.

So basically, these people are not making as much money as before... and they have gotten used to that large fat cow every pay day so lets just give them money even though their media is getting outdated and eroded more each passing day.

No, they're not just making less money, many of them are outright going out of business. The ones that are surviving are hitting lower limits on expenses. The physical newspaper isn't as popular, but the consumption of news is dramatically up and when newspapers (who write by far more and more in-depth news than anyone else) close shop it's a problem for both their community and the whole nation.

A free press has been called "the fourth estate" in its role as a government watchdog. Without it things like the break in at the Watergate Hotel would have been a footnote in the Washington Post and McCarthism could have lasted months or years longer.

And if they come to depend on the government to fund them, how well do you think they will continue to function as a check on the government?

Ask the British, the BBC uses one such model

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The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

The difference between a government-funded press and "no press to smash" is irrelevantly small if we're talking about the notion of "free press" envisioned by the founders. Not to mention that your assertion that free press is the notion upon which the United States was founded is absurd.

Edited to add: in fact, the very idea that you're invoking the will of the founders in an effort to somehow justify governmental intervention at the federal level to prop up the centralized dissemination of information is ridiculous. Do you honestly believe you could sit Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin down in a room and convince them that the federal government should levy taxes to fund news publishing? Have you even read anything they wrote?

And the argument to levy taxes is a bad one. The argument to support the press in some, tangible, way rather than let it dry up into either an oligarchy of large homogeneous companies or be thrown to the wolves and disappear is very valid[/quote]

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And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Luckily, there's no such thing as the parties and companies you mention influencing the news that gets reported by "real" journalists. This is why Fox News is such a bastion of rationality and objectivity.[/quote]

And there are hundreds of other news sources to choose from besides Fox News. Bloggers are amateurs with little to no training often on even how to write a coherent sentence, much less how to report. Journalists go through four years of university, studying not only journalism but political science, history, writing and the science, math, logic and arts their degree requires - sometimes to do little more in the industry than check someone's spelling for a living.

Who would you rather take legal advice from? A lawyer who's gone to law school and passed the bar or someone who enjoys Court TV?

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Oh, if only the buggy whip manufacturers had some good lobbyists they would still be getting _free_ money to this day - from the govt. and you and me.

Strawman. The free press has nothing to do with this analogy.

And you'd be right, if we were talking about plans to save the free press. As soon as it becomes dependent on government money or intervention, it ceases to be the free press. Instead, we're talking about saving a business model - because that's all these suggestions would accomplish.[/quote]

And some of the plans lists would do away with the current business models almost entirely. The worst news industry is doing a great job about killing itself, but it's also hurting the honest part, too. The big business Fox/CNN/MSNBC side doesn't need help, it's the local side that is suffering. There will probably be a realignment of local papers into an almost purely Internet based model within a decade or two, but until then they need to stay afloat.

My hometown has one major paper and a few small town papers in the surrounding communities for what the big one doesn't cover and a weekly alternative that has an unabashed bias. I've seen that big paper go from nearly an inch thick during the week to shorter than those small town papers were back then. It's possible it might not survive long enough to see a web-only edition, then what would my community have? Four TV news stations reporting 30 seconds of "news" at a time and no one writing in-depth articles about the region.

Yes, our news media is lazy and doesn't do their job, but the general wisdom is that publicly funded news sources (that is not government directed, just funded, like the BBC I mentioned) tend to offer more in-depth and balanced news than private industry. Does that mean they're infallible? No. But they're also less likely to be swayed by the threat of advertisers leaving and a properly written law would ensure a "trust fund" that couldn't be subjected to political whims and given on a need basis to private companies as well as being a pool for groups like NPR, PBS and CPB.

Journalist are like teachers, they get out of school wanting to change the world and by the time they retire they're the most jaded people you will ever meet.

Unfortunately, all the seemingly reasonable ideas won't solve the problem that they are REALLY complaining about. Jobs and Profits.

There is more news being generated today than any other time in History. But the increase is produced by non-professional authors (side step define journalist) not the guys with a steady pay check.

And the reason that traditional media is suffering is that historically the news was never the money maker. It was always the hook for the advertising which paid the bills. All of the funding proposals are designed to replace the fact that marketing funds are going to other outlets. To my knowledge, the total amount in Marketing hasn't decreased as a ratio of sales; it is just not going to traditional media.

To compound the problem with profits, many of the large media companies are leveraged to the hilt, so they don't have the resources to adjust. Just complain that they aren't making as much money as in the past.

It seems like the market is working very well. Outfits like Ars Technica, The Economist and of course The Register are getting me better insight on the world than I had back in the days of CNN and WSJ.

It is really just the "mainstream" media that is broken, and touting facts as opinions, and they hardly need a subsidy for that.

This is an old principle of the internet: "access to information makes smart people smarter and stupid people stoopider".

Maybe what we really need here is some action from the FCC against news organizations reporting opinion as fact, or publishing content they know to be false. At least we could make the stupid people a little less stupid.

This is one of the worst-written pieces I've seen on Ars. I suppose when the headline is as over-the-top as "annals of imbecility," I should have set my expectations down near the sea bed. But since this is Ars and Ars is usually calmer than the average tech site, I foolishly expected a reasoned argument instead of a strange freak-out. As the author points out, nobody with any power to do anything is proposing a fee. Nothing to see here; move along.

Even as non-news, the author continually declines to engage in reasoned discourse. The proposal for for the ISP surcharge is festooned with a "it comes from a DC lawyer" banner to rally the masses against it. He warns us to "prepare to bang your head on the table" when we read an opposing view.

No wonder the author opposes any surcharge that might pay journalists: he's clearly not one. This doesn't even raise to the standards of average blog quality opinion posting. For shame, editors, for letting this shoddy work sully the Ars banner.

I don't see anything in your own counter-rant that contradicts anything in the piece, so I'm not quite clear on what you're objecting to. And yes, you should bang your head on the table when reading that; ISPs aren't forcing website publishers to adopt any particular business model, and publishers are in fact doing all sorts of things right now to experiment with funding.

What does any of this have to do with the ISPs? I mean, at least with music there's the glimmer of a real argument; ISPs benefit when people use P2P to download music, since it makes their service more valuable. But that music and video is (mostly) illicit, and hence once -could- make an argument about squeezing the ISPs to get money for this illicit use; with the news, it's mostly legitimate content from legitimate websites. Slapping a big tax on ISPs in response to this makes absolutely no sense, though you're welcome to argue that it does.

The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

And on your second point you are also wrong. The first thing a dictator does is to smash the airport runways and then to seize the lines of communication. The presses won't ever be smashed, they'll be used to for propaganda.

You're thinking centuries later than I am, though it's happened fairly recently as well. At one time any press was dangerous since that press could be used to print propaganda (and books, bibles, etc.) by day and the printer could (and did) turn around and print subversive literature by night.

At least you disclosed that. It provides some insight into your thought process.

I agree it is unfortunate the journalism industry is going to be diminished or damaged by the existing trends. But no one has any business using tax money to remedy the situation. And I completely disagree that bloggers cannot be legitimate journalists. From what I see, the S/N ratio seems to be about the same for the two.

So basically, these people are not making as much money as before... and they have gotten used to that large fat cow every pay day so lets just give them money even though their media is getting outdated and eroded more each passing day.

No, they're not just making less money, many of them are outright going out of business. The ones that are surviving are hitting lower limits on expenses. The physical newspaper isn't as popular, but the consumption of news is dramatically up and when newspapers (who write by far more and more in-depth news than anyone else) close shop it's a problem for both their community and the whole nation.

A free press has been called "the fourth estate" in its role as a government watchdog. Without it things like the break in at the Watergate Hotel would have been a footnote in the Washington Post and McCarthism could have lasted months or years longer.

The United States was founded on the notion of having and maintaining a free press and dismissing it as being "outdated" is both unpatriotic and outright dangerous. The first thing a dictator does when they come to power is smash the presses; you're suggested to not even have a press to smash.

And, for the record and it can't be said enough nor loud enough bloggers are not journalists. Period. A vast majority have a political agenda or are outright paid by the parties and companies they support.

Quote:

Oh, if only the buggy whip manufacturers had some good lobbyists they would still be getting _free_ money to this day - from the govt. and you and me.

Strawman. The free press has nothing to do with this analogy.

I think the analogy is quite good. Every news organization I can think of has an online outlet. All carry advertising and some charge for access. The public has decided that they want their news electronically and are going to forgo reading printed paper. Propping up outmoded business models will not work in the long run. Welcome to 2010.

Online and cable media present a wide variety of opinions which has made the news media more free than it has ever been. I can watch to Fox news or MSNBC. I can watch a Michale More movie or follow the NRA. All of which in the past was unavailable because some editor at the local newspaper didn't think it was "appropriate."

This is my issue:"...But the other part of the problem is that too many journalists are not reporting quality news..."

It seems all news is the same sound bit, one line quote and sensational story after the next. Besides I really though just about all news comes from one or two sources, AP/The Wire. Because wasn't that the back bone of a few Internet jokes a while back. Post something so high up in the news food chain that Everybody reports on it?

I would rather just have them actually investigate something instead of republishing the same blog, personal opinion. My opinion in the news is the fact we all are overwhelmed by the amount of information we have access too and news outlets need a way to lure more people into their web.

When CNN has a story on who is getting a boob job or other outlanding story I really have to wonder if there is really nothing else they could have choose to report on. Same goes for digging up Youtube videos...As news? Come on.

However, some kind of consortium-based subscription model might help to replace the old (and completely dead) model, exactly along the lines of what's discussed above but (again) not as an extortionate tax but rather as a voluntary payment. You'd pay perhaps $10.00 per month and be subscribed to 10 or 50 or maybe 100 different publications. Gee, does that sound familiar? I might not want to be nickled and dimed to death by 20 publications, but I might want a clean and simple single payment to get online access to a consortium of them.

I'm not the type of person to use an online subscription as much as I would the paper - I like to wander back and forth from section to section and article to article, and with too many sites, you need to either open a thousand and one tabs or you'll never find that article again. With paper, they article I saw on B17 is still going to be on B17.

Nevertheless, I'd love to see something like what you propose become the foundation of an cover + ala carte system. For a minimum cover of $5 or $7.50/month, users would get access to 0 or 100 points worth of media. Users could allocate those points to whatever courses they want, with different products costing different points (thus accommodating for differences in product). After using the base allotment, users can add additional products for $.05/point. Users wouldn't need to get the channels they don't use, and the distribution company would have a minimal spend from subscribers to ensure some profit.

The problem with this type of proposal is that online news has always been free, and thus has a perfectly elastic demand. Even if all the major and medium players got together to erect a paywall, consumers would be unwilling to pay the increased cost. This would lead to a whole crop of new suppliers rushing to fill the void with a new free service. So if your goal is to expedite the demise of the current suppliers then a large paywall system is the fastest route.